The philosopher Olli Lagerspetz notes that in continental Europe there is a widely believed stereotype of the British as “inordinately fond of bathtubs, lukewarm water … but otherwise with a doubtful sense of hygiene”. This was confirmed for him when his first child was born in the newly built Singleton Hospital in Swansea: “We were shown into the delivery room, where the floor was adorned with a carpet. A carpet.” He notes that “carpets in delivery rooms are not to be thought of in the Nordic countries”.
The distinction between clean and dirty is a universal organising principle in human society, like right and wrong: “Homo sapiens is also Homo sordidus – not merely the rational animal but also the dirty (and clean) animal.” Today dirt is fashionable. Every modern art gallery has works made from “the abject”: discarded food, menstrual blood or urine, such as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ. This is, Lagerspetz argues, a reaction to the cult of rationality and purity preached by the modernists: “The dirty is now real life, the clean is plastic, whereas our longing for purity stands out as fear of life itself in its full messy detail.”
Lagerspetz’s book is an investigation into what we mean by “dirt” and whether it is an actual quality of the world or, as most current theoretical work would have us believe, a subjective idea projected on to reality. Lagerspetz deconstructs the easy reductionism of theorists for whom “dirt is not really dirt but something else”. This includes such luminaries as Mary Douglas (for whom dirt was merely “matter out of place”) and Julia Kristeva, who he says has banished dirt “to the misty regions of symbolism”. He believes this is a mistake, one that has arisen because “matter is not perceived as strange enough”.
Instead he argues we have “a double-minded” relation to the material world and to dirt in particular. We perceive the world around us as a collection of neutral physical objects and as a network of meaningfully connected things. For us, dirt is both a real quality of the world and part of a symbolic, culturally relative order. Lagerspetz argues that “neither side of the coin should be explained away”: Homo sordidus needs both in the struggle to keep clean. And a carpet in a hospital delivery room may be acceptable – in Britain at least.
• A Philosophy of Dirt is published by Reaktion. To order a copy for £15 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
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